1. Field
This disclosure generally relates to selecting pages of a document to provide a page of interest to a user browsing an electronic document.
2. Description of the Related Art
When browsing a paper magazine, book or other document, a reader stops browsing when the reader reaches a page that looks interesting enough to examine further and then proceeds to examine that page before possibly browsing further. The act of physically browsing a document includes, for some readers, flipping through the document without viewing much if any content on some of the pages. Then something on a page catches the reader's eye and the reader stops to examine that page further. In examining the page further, the reader gathers more information about the page and may decide to start reading the content on the page. Many factors go into a how a page catches a reader's eye and causes the reader to stop browsing at that page. Many of these factors are not ones of which the reader is immediately conscious as he or she stops on a page.
The process of browsing a document is difficult to replicate with an electronic document because the reasons for browsing past a page or stopping to examine a page further in a physical document involve so many different factors. Available readers for electronic documents may provide tools for jumping ahead a predetermined number of pages. However, jumping ahead a fixed number of pages in an electronic document is not a good electronic version of browsing. There is no assessment of the page upon which the reader lands suggesting that that page is more likely to catch the reader's eye as opposed to any other page. For example, the page displayed after jumping ahead may be the middle of an article which is not a page on which a user would stop browsing in a physical document.
Thus, skipping forward or behind a predefined number of pages does not truly provide an electronic equivalent of browsing through a physical book or magazine.